… One of the tasks for an English teacher is to get students writing. I have found that putting students into groups to work on one paragraph together prepares them for writing on their own. Here are two lesson plans … Continue reading
Category Archives: Writing
Writing in the Present, Past, and Future: The Dog and Its Bone: Intermediate ESL
… Objective: In groups of three, students will write a story. First, by looking at three sequential pictures, they will name the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs that they see. Then, they will write the words they’ve discovered on separate … Continue reading
An ESL Lesson: Writing a Story Using Picture Prompts and Correction Marks
… To the teacher: I took the idea for this lesson from an ESL workbook that I used many years ago. Nothing remains of the book, but for this picture, which I now use as a prompt to get students … Continue reading
American Music: Lesson One: Pick A Bale Of Cotton. What is Rhythm? Template for Writing a Five Paragraph Essay
… … Lesson One: Pick A Bale Of Cotton … To the teacher: Lesson One uses five handouts. If they are going to be printed and handed out in class, print them back to back to save on paper. If … Continue reading
Poetry Lesson: Fog by Carl Sandburg
… What follows is an ESL lesson I use with Fog by Carl Sandburg. I present it from the point of view of a teacher talking. The objective is to get the student writing, and that process is divided into … Continue reading
The Storm: Creation of a Poem
… In Wuhan, China, summer of 2008, one stormy evening after my poetry workshop, Richard, a young scientist majoring in Physics, offered to walk me back to the hotel sharing his umbrella in the pouring rain as we made it … Continue reading
Bernadette Mayer’s Tomorrow: writing in the future
… I admire a poem by Bernadette Mayer called “Tomorrow.” It’s from a book of hers called Scarlet Tanager. The poem is a good prompt to get my ESL students writing about the future and the conditional. In the poem … Continue reading
Forget: Beautiful thoughts simply expressed
… Beautiful thoughts aren’t always pretty and neither are beautiful words. At the poetry workshop this summer at Wuhan I’d show two short poems by Alice Notley that were simple to understand. Here is one of them. After Tsang Chih … Continue reading
Exquisite Corpses: Wuhan Poetry 2010
… The six photos above were picked at random. I first picked 13 because 13 is one of my favorite numbers, then I flipped a coin, tails (odds) and heads (even) to eliminate either 6 or 7 of them. It … Continue reading